Kiev - (AFP) - Russia announced Sunday that a drone attack on the headquarters of its Black Sea fleet in Sevastopol in the Crimea peninsula injured six people, prompting Moscow to declare a state of alert in the city.

And the Russian bombing continued on Ukrainian cities, especially in the south, in Mykolaiv, which witnessed the heaviest bombing since the beginning of the war , killing at least two people, according to local authorities.

On Saturday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky called on the residents of Donetsk to evacuate to avoid "Russian terrorism" and the bombing of this region in the east of the country, a large part of which Russia controls.

In a video recording, Zelensky said, "A government decision has been taken for a mandatory evacuation" of the area, saying that "at this stage of the war, terrorism is Russia's main weapon."

"This morning, Ukrainian nationalists decided to spoil the Russian Fleet Day," which Moscow celebrates on Sunday, Sebastopol Governor Mikhail Razvozgayev said in a message via Telegram.

He pointed out that a drone attack targeted the headquarters of the Russian Black Sea Fleet in Sebastopol on Sunday, wounding six people.

Razvozgaev said that all celebrations of the Russian Fleet Day were "cancelled for security reasons," calling on Sebastopol residents not to leave their homes "if possible."

Authorities declared a "yellow" (medium) terror attack alert level after the attack, according to photos released by the governor of Sebastopol showing smashed window panes on the ground.
The Ukrainian Navy considered that the Russians fabricated an excuse to cancel the planned celebrations in Sebastopol, for fear of a real attack.
"In fact (...) the Russians + invented an excuse to cancel the celebrations, so as not to humiliate themselves before the world because of their fear of the Ukrainian army," the Ukrainian Navy wrote on Facebook.

"The liberation of the occupied Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea will take place in another, more effective way," Sergey Prachuk, a spokesman for the regional administration in Odessa, said in a statement.

These developments came as Russian President Vladimir Putin announced Sunday, while attending a naval military parade in St. Petersburg (northwest), that the Russian fleet will receive "in the coming months" a new "Zircon" hypersonic cruise missile that "does not face any obstacles."

In southern Ukraine, the Mykolaiv authorities announced that the city was subjected Sunday to the "heaviest" Russian bombing since the start of the war in February, killing at least two people, according to the city's mayor, Oleksandr Senkevich.

This bombing killed the Ukrainian millionaire Oleksiy Vadatorsky, the owner of the main Ukrainian company for the distribution of grain, and his wife.

"He was one of the most important agricultural businessmen in the country, a major figure in the region and an important employer," Ukrainian presidential advisor Mykhailo Podolyak said on Telegram, suggesting that the strike targeted them in particular.

Other strikes targeted the regions of Kharkiv (east) and Sumy (northeast).

The Mayor of Kharkiv, Igor Terekhov, announced that some buildings were damaged "in a series of explosions" in the city.
One person was killed and two injured in the Sumy region, which saw "more than 50 strikes" in the last 24 hours, according to Governor Dmytro Zhivitsky.

Pavlo Kirilenko, governor of the Donetsk region, where Moscow has focused most of its attacks, said three civilians were killed and eight wounded in the bombing on Saturday.

Bakhmut, one of the few cities still under Ukrainian control in the Donetsk region, has become the center of the Russian offensive in eastern Ukraine.

Capturing this city will allow Russia to control a strategic highway that will give it access to Kramatorsk, the administrative capital of the Ukrainian part of the Donetsk region.
More than a third of the city's population, which had about 73,000 people before the war, fled.

On Friday, the bombing of a barracks containing captured Ukrainian soldiers in a Russian-occupied sector in the Donetsk region killed about fifty people, in what Zelensky described as a "deliberate Russian war crime."

Ukraine's presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak on Sunday questioned the Russians' account of a "strike" they accused the Ukrainian army of carrying out, writing on Twitter: "Strike? No, it's a terrorist attack. First, satellite images show that one building was damaged. Second, prisoners were brought to the site before the attack. Third, image analysis showed a thermal explosion from the inside.”

And the International Committee of the Red Cross announced Sunday that it had not yet obtained official permission from Moscow to visit the site in Sebastopol, and stressed that "it is necessary for the International Committee of the Red Cross to reach immediately" to the site and to the victims.
On Saturday evening, the Russian Defense Ministry announced that it had "officially invited" experts from the United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross to visit the site "with the aim of conducting an objective investigation."

Since Friday, Ukraine has asked the Red Cross and the United Nations Human Rights Monitoring Mission, which in May supervised negotiations with the Russians for the surrender of the defenders of the Azovstal plant in Mariupol (southeast), to go to Olenivka.
"When the defenders of Azovstal left, the United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross acted as guarantors of the lives and health of our soldiers," Zelensky said Friday evening, calling on the United Nations and the Red Cross to "act."

And then, after long weeks of siege and resistance in the steel complex, about 2,500 Ukrainian fighters surrendered and Moscow announced that they would be imprisoned in Olynivka.

The Russian Investigative Committee announced that Olenivka was bombed on Friday, confirming that the Ukrainian forces "fired by themselves at the prison where the members of the Azov battalion were being held, using American missiles from the HIMARS system" and high-precision missile launchers provided by the United States.
Ukrainian intelligence said that the attack was "carried out by mercenaries from the Russian Wagner Group," whose members are accused of committing crimes in Syria and Africa in particular.